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Replica of Lincoln funeral-train engine to stop at Statehouse

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photo2015 LINCOLN FUNERAL TRAINThe Leviathan 63 is a full-size replica of one of the engines that pulled President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train in 1865. It will be on display here on April 24 and in Wellington on April 18-20.

Your Right to Know

Nearly 149 years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, the president’s appeal to the public imagination
remains undiminished.

Next year, on the 150th anniversary of the assassination, a re-enactment of his funeral train,
covering 13 days, 10 major cities — including Columbus and Cleveland — and more than 1,600 miles
will recall a period of mourning unprecedented in American history.

Columbus and Wellington, Ohio, in Lorain County, will get an advance look at part of the funeral
procession when the Leviathan 63, a full-size replica of one of the engines that pulled the train,
arrives for a short visit this month. The Leviathan will be at the Statehouse on April 24, preceded
by a stop in Wellington at the Lake Shore Railway Association on April 18-20.

William Werst, 71, a native of Springfield, Ohio, who lives in Elgin, Ill, is executive director
of the 2015 Lincoln Funeral Train project, a nonprofit, voluntary organization planning an event
that spans seven states and uses no government funding. The Leviathan will travel by rail much of
the way, but it will be transported on a truck trailer over parts of the route.

Werst, a retired insurance agent who has been a train buff since he was a child in Ohio, said
that after the trauma of the Civil War, Lincoln instantly “became the martyr, the fallen leader”
upon his assassination by John Wilkes Booth.

“It was like when (President John F.) Kennedy died, the same phenomenon.” Werst said. “People
felt like he was cut down in the prime of his life when he was getting things done.”

Americans needed to pay their respects, to mourn and shower the fallen leader with grief, Werst
said. Although Mary Todd Lincoln initially opposed the funeral train because she just wanted her
husband buried in Chicago, it became “a moving funeral service that over 3 million people observed
from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill.,” Werst said.

Re-enacting it, he said, will be like bringing a museum to the people.

The man responsible for the meticulous construction of the Leviathan replica is David H. Kloke
of Illinois, owner of Kloke Construction. He developed a passion about the train after watching a
Lincoln documentary. Now he is building a replica of the funeral car, originally designed as
Lincoln’s “Air Force One” of his day. The president never got to use it while alive.

Little-known facts about the funeral train:

• Lincoln’s son, Willie, who died at the White House in 1862, was disinterred and placed in a
small coffin to accompany his father home to his final resting place in Springfield.

• The president’s body was packed in ice inside a coffin made with a wooden outer lining, a
middle layer of lead, and an inner layer of wood covered in silk. It was so heavy that eight
pallbearers were needed to carry it.

• Lincoln’s corpse slowly decomposed over the long trip. Embalming was in its infancy, and an
undertaker on the train applied chalk frequently to cover the green pallor. “Fragrant flowers” were
requested at each site to disguise the odor.

• The train avoided Cincinnati for fear that Copperheads — Northerners who sympathized with the
South — would disrupt the event.

Newspaper accounts of the funeral train reveal a remarkable national outpouring of grief, not
only in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Columbus and Indianapolis, but also in small towns and
whistle stops along the way.

Mourners lined the tracks, standing for hours in rain, sometimes in large groups. At some spots,
hastily assembled church choirs sang hymns and dirges. People lighted bonfires and torches and
erected floral wreaths over the track. Buildings along the route were draped in mourning cloth,
flags were at half-staff, bells tolled.

A banner at Cardington in Morrow County, Ohio, said, “He sleeps in the blessings of the poor
whose fetters God commanded him to break.”

The somber entourage arrived in Columbus at 7:30 a.m. on April 29, according to
The Daily Journal newspaper. The train straddled High Street at the old Union Depot so
Lincoln’s coffin could be removed and loaded onto a funeral carriage that was drawn to the newly
completed Statehouse by six white horses. His open coffin was placed in the Statehouse Rotunda
where, in 6 1/2 hours, it was viewed by an estimated 50,000 people who streamed past
constantly.

“Thousands of persons stood in line on High Street, four abreast,” waiting to get in, the
newspaper said.

For weeks afterward, Ohioans visited the Statehouse to see the spot where the body had been.

Another Ohioan, Scott Trostel of Fletcher in Miami County, began researching the Lincoln funeral
train when he was 14, and 37 years later, he wrote books about the Lincoln inaugural train and
funeral train.

The national mourning at Kennedy’s death, while deep and long, “didn’t hold a candle in
comparison to Lincoln,” Trostel said.